#TOTW 07/04/15 Rolling

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Hello Traceurs! It’s that time again – Theme Of The Week!!!

This week’s theme is Rolling. This may sound a bit dull but trust us, this one can be highly intense, fun and really challenging whether you have just started or are an advanced practitioner.

Rolling is one of the key foundation movements that we teach in Parkour. This is because it has been scientifically proven to disperse energy when taking a landing (if you don’t believe me then check out the video and study at the bottom). It does take a lot of technique and so a lot of practice to get a roll that you are comfortable with on hard ground. For some it can take years and years and even very experienced Traceurs still make mistakes which usually presents itself as a sore shoulder or the largest part of the Pelvis called the Ilium. The more specific place is, the inner back part of the Ilium, as seen below.

The trick is to roll past the left side of the left red circle or the right side of the right one so that you don’t roll on your Spine or Ilium but just the muscle. The line you want to take is seen below:

So as you can see, the red line misses the majority of the spine and hips. It only goes across the spine at the bottom where the muscle protrudes so your spin doesn’t actually have to contact the ground at all. The stronger your back, the more protected your bones are. In the image on the right you can see that the roll travels along the large muscles like the Trapeze, the inner Latissimus Dorsi and the Gluteus Maximus.

So once you have got the feeling of where the roll travels and you are pretty comfortable with it, we can start having fun! We can start using it to overcome obstacles instead of using vaults, you can start dive rolling which is fun but is also great for getting through small spaces like between two bars and you can also test out how good your roll is by using it when exiting many other movements such as a lâche*, under-bar**, cat-pass/kong***, running jumps and pretty much anything you can think of.